Root Removal - BB Rippers?

[Beltzington]

General question: how does one of those walk behind trencers (ditch witch) do with 3" hardwood roots?

From my experience with 2" roots not well at all, this year I had to dig 30' of 3" wide 18" deep trench in hard clay with roots so I rented the largest tracked walk behind HD had. It still beat me up and I had to manually chop through many of the larger roots with a hand tool.

 

[sdef]

General question: how does one of those walk behind trencers (ditch witch) do with 3" hardwood roots?

My property is a small hardwood forest with heavy, dense clay and rock as deep as I and the various utility companies have gone. I cleared ~ 1.5+ acres for our new home site and had a bulldozer remove the stumps I did not. The cable company trenched with a vibratory plow type of trencher for fiber (lucky me due to some gov. rural communications program I imagine) ~ 150' alongside the road, then ~ 375' up the middle of the driveway and then ~ 200' across the front yard. Their machine was a bit larger than the typical Ditch Witch I have seen but they had no problem going down ~ 24" - 32" cutting through everything and uplifting large amounts of rocks with many weighing ~ 50 pounds each. I threw away some 3" and maybe a bit larger roots they uplifted, although most of the cleanup was rocks.

 

[check]

I would get a sharpened ripper truth, and if it is not already on the tooth, grind some teeth so you can actually saw the roots. This would work very well on your BH if you have one on the tractor.

 

[rswyan]

Roots ? ... we got roots ...

Piles are a combination of roots and some brush, some taken up with a root rake/grapple, but mostly with our Kubota B2910 and the scarifiers on our 5' Woods box blade, set the deepest they will go. There are some 3 inchers in there.

They are however mostly poplar/aspen - which are fairly brittle and break easily - and not hardwood:

FWIW, I'm guessing that removing roots that are no longer attached to a stump might be a little easier than removing ones that are ...